Read the Prologue

Dalia opened the scrapbook she’d kept faithfully all these years, dreading what she might rediscover. It had begun innocently enough—photographs from their college days gave rise to an unexpected smile on Dalia’s troubled face. Seeing a snapshot of Nasser ready for squash, racket in his hand, confident grin, prepared to demolish his opponent, made Dalia feel suddenly like a schoolgirl. Who could resist him?

In more recent photos, Nasser seemed like a different person. His once-shining eyes appeared dull; his demeanor, subdued. The moment that had marked Nasser’s turn was clear. It had begun at graduation with the appearance of the bearded stranger who’d dropped the bombshell about Nasser’s mother. That was when the constant tick-tock of worry began. But were there earlier signs—things she should have noticed? Nasser’s transformation had felt sudden, its intensity seeming to ignite a sleeping fire within the family and precipitating a radical change in his sister, Houda, too—though her evolution had been more gradual.

How did I not see it coming? Dalia pored through the old photos, searching for red flags, but all she found was sunshine, washing out all the details. It seemed they were laughing in every one. Maybe she had never worried at all until it was too late. Was there anything I could have done?

One iconic photo felt particularly revealing: against a vivid clump of palms and bougainvillea, Adham and Youssef were beaming as they held up their university diplomas. Adham was leaning forward and holding his toward the camera, his lips pursed and eyebrows twisted into a hammy caricature of seductiveness. Youssef stood tall, his expression calm and composed, a quiet counterpoint to Adham’s exuberance. In the foreground, arms spread in a gesture of triumph, Nasser knee-slid into front and center, his eyes and smile wide. The sudden motion of his entrance blurred his figure a bit at the edges. It wasn’t a pose; he’d really slid into the photo just as Dalia snapped the shutter. Nasser looked cool and graceful, like he’d planned it, but she wondered, What was in his heart? Was Nasser afraid they’d take the photos without him? Had he already begun to drift away from them then?

Surely the handsome man in this photo would never have left them to spout murderous perversions of scripture, to stash guns in some cave in Sinai or Iraq, to plot, to kill, to end up lying under a cemetery stone.

Then she turned to the fateful news clipping from when Nasser had been arrested in 2002. Dalia felt profound sadness as she relived the moment in the police station where Nasser had paced like a tiger, his pride and idealism trapped inside walls that could never contain his boundless energy.

“Ahada, ya Nasser,” Dalia’s lawyer father had told Nasser. Cool it down.

“Why?” he’d seethed. “My only crime is wanting to fight injustice.”

Fight, he had—with bruises to show for it. Could she have prevented it? Maybe, but Dalia froze. Even a decade later, she could still feel the pangs of guilt, so palpable and consuming in the moment, and reawakened now by a scrap of newsprint. It was she, after all, who’d diverted Nasser from his dreams of launching a startup as a tech engineer with an Ivy League MBA. Instead, he’d joined Dalia’s hyperlocal nonprofit, serving the poorest of the poor—and it had landed him in jail, where people thought the seeds of radicalization were planted in Nasser’s mind. No one had dared to say it aloud or blame her—except Adham in a moment of rage.

The news report, with its haunting photograph—Nasser holed up in his cell—accompanied by the sensational caption—“Jailed son of esteemed Professor Omar El-Mohammedi”—hurt her on so many levels.

Like all of them, Dalia held Omar in high esteem, yet she’d received nothing but grief from her nouveau riche mother about Nasser’s family. When Nasser went dark and disappeared, her family began lining up “more suitable suitors.” And then came the talks about hymenoplasty that made Dalia want to crawl out of her skin. Dalia found herself flushed with rage at her mother’s presumption and assumptions about her virginity, which happened to be intact. Nasser had been the consummate gentleman—unlike her petty, intolerant family. Yet Nasser was complicated.

It was one thing to be a charismatic rebel, another entirely to be a jihadist—if that was really what he’d become. Dalia wondered which Nasser would live on in her mind and memory. For now, it was the gentleman—the one she’d fallen in love with. He’d been the brightest of them all, the best. If Nasser had lost hope and lost his way, then what would the future hold for the rest of them?

Or was it they, after all, who’d left him behind?

Dalia closed her eyes, willing herself back to that time. Is the past a country we can visit? Sometimes she thought so.